Left Nietzscheans

The past century has seen a tradition of scholars talking past one another on Nietzsche and Marx. To be sure, this has a number of causes - and the current essay does not aspire to wave them all away - but the most important of these is equivocation especially the equivocation interior to professional philosophy as such. Hence, and part from disciplinary differences in political theory/social economics, political/comparative sociology, ethnography, intellectual history, etc., philosophy as such breaks down, mostly, into analytic kinds, including what analytic philosophers name "continental," by which is not meant the traditional continental philosophy of the sort one might have read in Derrida or Gadamer or Baudrillard but analytically styled versions of 'continental philosophy', articulated in analytic or standardized mainstream terms with respect to conventionally "continental" names like Nietzsche (and Husserl and Heidegger) and to a lesser degree - and this may be instructive - Marx, Adorno, etc. For this reason ( among  others ), Nietzsche is not read as a thinker of the socio-political sphere much less of political economy and certainly not as theorist of science or logic but as a critic of morality and religion. This limitation is in spite of Nietzsche's life-long absorption with questions of logic, science, and epistemology, including questions of method, especially
regarding the study of Greek antiquity, including history. There are different but related difficulties when it comes to reading Nietzsche as a Marxist (in this essay I point to Hegel as the lynchpin, key for Marx and not key for Nietzsche but all too often a lens worn by analytic scholars of the so-called history of philosophy). Throughout, one's point of departure determines what can and cannot be said just as it determines what is and is not seen.